As long-time St. Louis activist Percy Green took questions Friday at the World Community Center on his decades of activist experiences, he grinned politely at the prospect of answering one audience member’s question, in particular: his thoughts on the efforts to recall St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay.

“I thought you would never ask,” he laughed.

The occasion of Green’s lecture was a discussion on protesting and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, of which he was a leading voice here in St. Louis. The event was hosted by the Peace Economy Project. After speaking for more than an hour-and-a-half, the final question he took was about the recall effort.

Green used the question as a platform to jump from addressing the legwork for signature-gathering for the recall effort to giving his opinion on the fight between Slay and his African-American constituency.

“Most of us don’t see Chief (Sherman) George and the recall Slay effort as a fight against blacks and City Hall,” Green said. “Others feel like Slay has been a poor manager of the city. Lots of the resources the current administration has used — like the new stadium — we needed a new stadium like a hole in the head. It wasn’t a new stadium. It was a replacement stadium.”

Green said Slay has misused city funds to reward business interest that have not benefited the city as a whole. He cited as the debate over the new Busch Stadium as an example where he believed the taxpayers were manipulated by the “false crisis” of Cardinal management threatening to move the team. Green saw it as a bluff.

“All of that was a game. They weren’t going any place,” Green said. “You don’t want administrators who are going to be gouging taxpayers whether they’re black or not.”

Green also gave his perspective on the firing of embattled Fire Chief Sherman George. While much has been reported of the fight being over hiring practices and race issues, Green, who was also fired by Francis Slay in 2001 from his post as head of the city’s minority business-certification program, said George’s dismissal had everything to do with money.

Green said that as Fire Chief George oversaw the fire code enforcement of downtown buildings, his refusal to approve building which he felt were unsafe rubbed Slay and the mayor’s developer contributors the wrong way. Green charged that Slay wanted George out to ease the path for these business people.

Green called the new chief a “patsy” there to “rubber stamp everything” for Slay and the downtown developers.

“Many people haven’t thought about it,” Green said. “They haven’t seen the connection.”

A recent Congressional subcommittee meeting on the deterioration of North St. Louis will not be in vain, according to a representative of Congressman Lacy Clay (D-Mo.)

Steve Englehardt, Clay’s communications director, said inquiries will continue, including an on-going HUD investigation to determine if the City of St. Louis used federal dollars meant for poor neighborhoods properly. Based on some preliminary findings, Englehardt said it’s “unlikely that is the case.” Englehardt also said the city could be doing “a lot more” to clean up north city by going “after bad, negligent land owners.”

Last Saturday Clay, along with Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Ca.) and Al Green (D-TX), held a Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity meeting last Saturday discussing the northside and what action the controversial Team 4 Plan may have had in North City’s economic downturn. Clay and others at the meeting said that while Team 4 was never officially approved by city government, the plan may have been unofficially used. The plan called for the lessening or elimination of city services to the northside in an effort to get people out of the homes. Once the homes were abandoned the property could be resold for development.

The city has consistently denied any formal or informal implementation of the 30-year-old plan.

At the meeting, a representative of Mayor Francis Slay, deputy mayor of development Barb Geisman said that she’d never read the plan, but asserted that it was “not relevant to anything we’ve been doing the last seven years.”

Developer Paul McKee, a man known to many for his secret Blairmont development plan for Old North St. Louis, is heading to China soon to lobby for Lambert Airport and his own 550 acres surrounding the airport to be used by the Chinese to distribute their goods in America, according to a story in today’s Post-Dispatch.

Lambert-St. Louis International Airport has never been a major cargo facility. In 2006, according to a trade group, it ranked 58th among U.S. airports in cargo traffic, compared to 33rd in passenger traffic.

Fleming notes that Lambert has excess capacity, good highway connections and lots of developable land around it.

Some of that land is controlled by McEagle Properties, which is building a 550-acre office and distribution center just east of Lambert. The warehouses and freight forwarders that would spring up around a cargo hub would be logical customers.

“Something like this could bring a tremendous amount of opportunity to the airport, and thus jobs,” said McEagle spokesman Dan Brungard. So McEagle Chief Executive Paul McKee is heading to China, too.

The jobs are what interests St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, who’ll also be making the trip, according to chief of staff Jeff Rainford.